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After 44 Years, England Wonders if Its Time Is Now

Wayne Rooney, left, is England’s most important player and John Terry, right, is its most beleaguered.Credit
Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press

LONDON — It has been reported that England’s national soccer team will sleep in special tents to prepare for the altitude in South Africa, site of the coming World Cup.

This undoubtedly came as a relief to many, given where a couple of high-profile players were said to be slumbering lately in scandals that cost defender John Terry his captaincy and his fellow defender Ashley Cole his marriage.

If England was as entertaining on the field as it has been in the tabloid bedroom farces, it might have won five or six World Cups, not one, on distant home soil in 1966. Alas, succeeding national teams have never quite shouldered the consuming expectation and sensationalist culture that makes “Footballers’ Wives” seem less like a soapy television drama than a gritty documentary.

Another World Cup approaches, with England opening against the United States on June 12, amid the usual blustery confidence and nervous concern. On one hand is the belief that as inventor of the game, England has a manifest destiny to win. On the other, there is fear that things will end achingly and prematurely in the quarterfinals, as they always seem to, more than likely against its historic rivals in war and soccer, Germany and Argentina, which eliminated England in five of its past seven World Cup appearances.

The gnawing absence of another championship has become known as 44 years “of hurt.” Public hope and torment are best captured in the lyrics of “Three Lions,” a song reference to the English coat of arms worn on the national team’s jerseys:

Phil Cornwell, an actor, comedian and soccer pundit, said: “We’re hostage to the fact that we’ve won it before. We feel we should win it every time. The collision of hope and anguish, that’s the appeal for me. Glorious failure. We thrive on that.”

Unfulfilled expectation plays out against an evolving post-imperial, post-industrial national identity, said David Goldblatt, author of “The Ball Is Round.” As Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have gained more governmental autonomy in Britain, the sense of what it means to be English becomes more urgently tied to the national soccer team, he said.

“The BBC is British, the army is British, the Parliament is British, the royal family is British,” Goldblatt said. “Where do you express what is English? In the national football team. The Church of England and the opera are not the stuff of which nationalism is made.”

A nation’s hopes this year rest largely on the convalescence of forward Wayne Rooney, who has shed his impetuous youth and now uses his feet to score prolific goals, not to stamp the genitals of an opposing player, which got him ejected from the quarterfinals of the 2006 World Cup. That year England exited — predictably enough — on penalty kicks.

Photo

Chelsea’s John Terry, right with his wife, Toni, lost the England captaincy after admitting an affair with Vanessa Peroncel, left, the girlfriend of Wayne Bridge.Credit
Left, Tim Ireland/Associated Press; Steve Parsons/Associated Press

Rooney is regarded as the second-best player in the world, behind only the wondrous Lionel Messi of Argentina, which infamously ousted England from the 1986 World Cup with help from Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal and again in 1998 after David Beckham was ejected. But Rooney, only just recovered from an injured ligament in his right ankle, has now strained a groin muscle. The country’s self-assurance is also limping.

“The groin will be fine for the World Cup,” Rooney said Sunday, speaking in the anatomical third person, adding that he hoped to play in Manchester United’s final English Premier League match on May 9.

So far, Rooney’s injuries have not summoned the hysteria of 2002, when Beckham broke a bone in his foot before the World Cup, former Prime Minister Tony Blair interrupted a cabinet meeting to comment and one tabloid asked readers to lay their hands on a full-size photo of Beckham’s foot in hopes of speeding his recovery.

Still, most people here accept that without Rooney at full strength, England has about as much chance of winning the World Cup as it does of winning the World Series.

“We’re totally relying on one player,” Cornwell said.

England’s fans and news media are often criticized for pressuring or tearing down star players as the World Cup approaches. There is much harrumphing that the celebrity culture of soccer has become corrosive.

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On Monday, Oliver Kay, the chief soccer correspondent for The Times of London, decried what he called malicious Internet gossip about an unnamed English star. His column received supportive online replies from readers, one of whom wrote, “We’re becoming a nation of cackling hags, waiting for the next victim at the guillotine.”

And yet, some of England’s biggest stars have brought their problems on themselves. Terry, who is married, was stripped of the captaincy of the national team in February after reports surfaced of his affair with a French lingerie model, who happened to be the estranged girlfriend and mother of the son of his England teammate Wayne Bridge.

Bridge refused to shake Terry’s hand the next time their club teams met, then removed himself from the national team, saying his presence would be divisive and distracting. Some applauded Bridge, but others criticized him for letting personal concerns override the professional ambition of winning a World Cup.

Later, Terry inadvertently struck a security guard with his car, breaking the man’s leg, after a match with Chelsea, his club team, and endured the fracturing of his own playing form. His tackling at Chelsea has grown malign, resulting in an ejection and a one-game suspension this month. Meanwhile, his father has been charged with dealing cocaine. Just a short time ago, Terry was expected to lead England at the World Cup. Now many consider him a liability.

Cole, another Chelsea defender, has returned to health after breaking his ankle in February and is expected to start at left back in the World Cup. His marriage, though, is over, according to news accounts, which have portrayed Cole as a serial philanderer of near Woodsian ambition. The dissolution of the marriage was apparently complicated by mingled finances and unfortunate calligraphy. According to The Daily Mail, Cheryl Cole, a pop singer, had Mrs. Cole tattooed on the back of her neck.

It did not help the turbulent betrothal that a topless model somehow ended up with photographs of what she said was a pantsless Cole on her cellphone, then naughtily reciprocated. Barry Glendenning jokingly wrote in The Guardian that the model “received anteroposterior, lateral and oblique images of the Chelsea ace’s cracked tibia. She replied with naughty snaps of her sternum, clavicle and lower cervical vertebrae during hours of dreary orthopedic exchanges.”

The coach hired to bring order to this entropic bunch is Fabio Capello, an Italian. In addition to removing Terry as captain, Capello has banned cellphones at team meals, frowned on social networking sites and told the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport that he planned to keep the team hotel alcohol-free in South Africa, leaving many to wonder whether he will initiate spelling bees and sewing circles to soothe the boredom.

“I don’t expect I’ll be sending them to the nearby casinos,” Capello told the Italian paper.

Access to the players by their wives and girlfriends — known by the acronym WAGS — was to be limited to one day between each game, Capello has said. At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the WAGS touched off a news media feeding frenzy with their shopping and partying. Capello has likened them to a virus, which he hopes will not be contagious in South Africa. Some, though, have wondered whether, by allowing sparse conjugal visits, he is treating his players more like prisoners than athletes. Tuesday, Capello said he was reconsidering.

Writing in 2006 in “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup,” the novelist Nick Hornby lamented the old days of English soccer, the war imagery, the sustenance of blood and effort in overcoming a lack of style and talent. Referring to Beckham, he wrote: “We’d still prefer to be bombing the Germans, but after 60 years, there’s a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren’t coming back any time soon, and in the meantime, we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We’re not happy about it, but what can we do?”

This widespread sense of underachievement is overblown, however, according to “Soccernomics,” a book that applies economic principles to the sport. Given England’s relatively small population, economic decline, shallow talent pool from an over-reliance on players from lower socio-economic classes and isolation until the 1990s from the soccer revolution in Western Europe, the national team performs as well as can be expected — or even better, the book argues.

It is often said that English players are thwarted in development because too many foreigners participate in the highly regarded domestic league. “Soccernomics” suggests the opposite: Too many English players are groomed in the rapacious home league, instead of in more relaxed leagues, and too often they are hurt, tired or unfocused by the time the World Cup arrives.

In South Africa, Brazil and Spain will be considered the favorites. England, ranked seventh in the world, will attempt to defy recent history, hoping that the sun has not yet set on the so-called golden generation of aging players that includes Terry, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand.

“If England doesn’t win, there will be a sense of if not now, when?” said Simon Kuper, a co-author of “Soccernomics.” “A lot of big names are coming to the end. There will be a sense that we are never going to do it in our lifetimes.”